256
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
256 points (90.8% liked)
Today I Learned (TIL)
6571 readers
1 users here now
You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?
/c/til is a community for any true knowledge that you would like to share, regardless of topic or of source.
Share your knowledge and experience!
Rules
- Information must be true
- Follow site rules
- No, you don't have to have literally learned the fact today
- Posts must be about something you learned
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
That's indeed really far from the "dirt" → "our planet" connection.
I dug a bit further into this matter and perhaps Ainu is not an exception. Perhaps - please take what I say with scepticism; I'm just hypothesising, nothing solid.
Accordingly to this Ainu-English dictionary, the word sir / シリ on its own means
Meanings #2 and #3 might be the result of simple homophony, but I think that they're related. And that the word モシㇼ/mosir is bimorphemic, with the second morpheme being "that" シㇼ/sir, that originally meant "soil" - otherwise it's hard to explain how it evolved into "mountain" under meaning #3. With then トィ/toy displacing the "old" word, and becoming the main word for "dirt, mud, soil".
Or perhaps it's just an exception and my hypothesis is bullshit. Either way thank you for bringing this piece of info up.
Interesting hypothesis! It's indeed likely this could be the case, it's just unfortunate only one variant of Ainu remains and that it's in quite a precarious position, but it's fun to see different paths of how words picked up their meanings either way.